Chapter 1...............Becoming a 21st Century Teacher

Key Topics

21st Century Education...

Smartphones and IPads, Apps for Teaching and Learning & Emerging Technologies...

Studies of Technology in Schools...

Reports on Technology...

Books on Computers & Technology

21st Century Education

Imagine you are designing the ultimate school for the 21st century.
Which technology tools will have the greatest impact on teaching and learning and why?






Bring on the Learning Revolution, Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk (May 2010)

Disruptive Technologies

10 Characteristics of Disruptive Innovations

Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation





Future Ready: Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education (2016). National Technology Education Plan

Living and Learning with Mobile Devices: What Parents Think About Mobile Devices for Early Childhood and K-12 Learning, 2013

Born in Another Time: Ensuring Educational Technology Meets the Needs of Students Today—and Tomorrow, a 2012 report from the National Association of State Boards of Education states that developing tech-savvy teachers is a priority for schools.

See also, Mobile Learning: Transforming Education, Engaging Students, and Improving Outcomes. Darrell M. West, Brookings Center for Technology Innovation (September 2013).

Mathematics Education for the Flat World: What Should We Be Teaching Our Children for Life in the 21st Century. Keith Devlin, researcher and the Math Guy on NPR.

For more on how teachers might select the technology they want to use for teaching, read Orchestrating Technology as a Teacher by Robert Maloy and Sharon Edwards from On Cue Magazine, Spring 2010.

How Many Students and Teachers Are There in 2016?

• 50.4 million public school students
• 5.2 million private school students
  • 24.6 million White Students
  • 25.9 million Non-White Students
    • 7.8 million Black students
    • 13.3 million Hispanic students
    • 2.7 million Asian/Pacific Islander students
    • 0.5 million American Indian/Alaska Native students
    • 1.5 million Two or More Races
• 1.7 million home schooled students (2011 figures)
• 3.1 million teachers
• 20.5 million students in higher education
  • For more information, see The Condition of Education from the National Center for Education Statistics

21st Century Teaching
What is 21st Century Education? from 21st century schools. For more on 21st century learning, see the 21st Century Fluency Project, a website for educators developed in New Zealand.

The History of Technology in Education from YouTube. See also, The Learning Machines, a graphic look at educational technologies from colonial times to the present from The New York Times (September 10, 2010).

Writing and Discussion Activity: Defining 21st-Century Learning
How do you know 21st Century teaching and learning when you see it? Is it a habit? A skill set? A mindset? Or is it simply the employment of a tool set?

• As you begin building your skills and competencies as a teacher, so too will you build a definition of 21 Century learning and teaching.
• Read the article, How Do You Define 21st Century Learning? One Question. Eleven Answers. As you read, note the wide range of perspectives on the topic.
• Choose a perspective or two and explain why it aligns with your current definition of 21st Century Learning and 21st Century Teaching.

The National Education Plan

Re-Imagining the Role of Technology in Education, the National Education Technology Plan offers a policy vision for technology in schools.

• The United States Department of Education has declared August is Connected Educator Month.

Definition of Technology
"A technology is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world." (Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Penquin Books, 2004, p. 114).

7 Things You Should Know about Technology is a resource for teachers and students from Educause Learning Initiative that offers brief descriptions of the educational and social uses of the latest technology tools.

Could This Be Your Classroom of the Future? from Edudemic looks at how the technology Intel envisions how teaching and learning will change in schools.

Smartphones and iPads, Apps for Teaching and Learning, and Emerging Technologies

Smartphones, iPads and Tablet Computers in Schools

How to Choose Between and Phablet and a Convertible Notebook from EdTech Blog, January 15, 2015.

Beyond the iPad: Schools' Choices in Tablets Grow from Mindshift, September 4, 2013.

See also Tech Integration section of this wiki for more on iPads and smartphones in schools.

iPads Offer New Teaching, Learning Tools for Concord's Elementary Schools (New Hampshire)

Click here to visit the website of the Tower School in Marblehead that provides an iPad for every student in Grades 3 to 8.

The Tablet Market Grows Cluttered, The New York Times, November 19, 2012.

Market Share for Tablets (3rd Quarter of 2012)

• iPad = 50%
• Samsung = 18%
• Amazon = 9%
• Google Nexus = 8.6%

For an ongoing perspective on integrating iPads into teaching, see the site, iPad in Schools

Check out One-Bit Internet: The iPad Is/Isn't a Content Creation Device by educational blogger Richard Gaywood for a perspective on ways to use iPads and other tablets for content consumption (read books, browse websites, view videos) and for content creation (including microcreation and macrocreation.

Popular Tablets for Young Children

• LeapPad2 Explorer by Leapfrog
• Tabeo by Toys R Us

Teachers Guide on the Use of iPad in Education from the blog, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning



Apps for Teaching and Learning

App Crawler is a search engine for apps for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

Best Educational Apps for Kids Every Parent Must Know from EdTechReview (August 1, 2015)

70 Best Apps for Teachers and Students, from Edudemic, September 2013.
For educator reviews of educational Apps, go to Get hAPPyfrom a group of teachers from the Arbor Park Intermediate School in Blair, Nebraska.

Compare Education Apps from Edudemic allows you to search iPad and iPhone apss by price, developer, release data and age group.

Top Educational iPad Apps Every Teacher and Student Should Know About

Apps for Children Fall Short on Disclosure to Parents, says a report from the Federal Trade Commission (December 2012).


Smartphones

Earth images reconstructed from photos taken by 3 smartphones in orbit 2013.

Half of all High School Students Take a Smartphone to School (Education Week Blog, May 2, 2013)

By 2010, 75% of youngsters, 12 to 17 years-old, had a cellphone. For more information, see How Young is Too Young for a Phone? from The Boston Globe, July 8, 2012. The article uses data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project to show:

• The typical teen texter sends 50 texts a day. They make 1 to 5 phone calls a day.
• Almost one in three teens (31%) sent over 100 text a day.

The Rise of the Connected Viewer. Aaron Smith, Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 17, 2012

• Half of American adults use cell phones while watching TV, creating a new phenomenon of multi-screen interactivity.

Is the Cell Phone the New Pencil? a blog post discusses the impact of technology on student writing.

Help Your Child Learn with Cell Phones and Web 2.0, Liz Kolb (ISTE, 2013).

40 Ways to Use Mobile Phones in the Classroom from Edudemic.

A Closer Look at Gadget Ownership: Demographics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, June 28, 2012.

• 88% of American adults have a cell phone
• 58% have a desktop computer
• 61% have a laptop
• 18% own an e-book reader
• 18% have a tablet computer

Studies of Technology in Schools

Students Spend a Lot of Time Facebooking, Searching and Texting is a 2011 survey that shows that college students on average send 96 text messages and receive 104 text messages every day.

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, a 2010 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation documents that teens and tweens average 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) using entertainment media (computers, video games, music players) in a typical day. Media multitasking (experiencing more than one media at a time) means youngsters experience 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) of media time during a day.

Children's Future Requests for Computers & the Internet, a 2011 report from the technology thinking group, Latitude.

The ABCs of e-Reading. In a study reported in the Wall Street Journal (August 25, 2010), 40% of the purchasers of e-readers said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. Some 11 million Americans are expected to own at least one digital reading device by the end of September, 2010.

2011 CDW-G 21st Century Classroom Report

• Students still say schools are not meeting their technology expectations.
• Districts are looking beyond current budget challenges. Despite the expectation that 47 percent of district IT budgets will decrease from current levels during the next school year, 65 percent of districts plan investments in classroom technology over the next two years.
• Students say smartphones (30 percent) and MP3 players (36 percent) are essential tools in a 21st-century classroom.
• Asked about technology as a communication tool, 59 percent of students say they communicate with other students every day, but only 23 percent use it to collaborate on assignments and projects with other students.

Reports on Technology in Schools

Surveying the Digital Future: 2014 Digital Future Report from the Center for a Digital Future

Born in Another Time: Ensuring Technology Meets the Needs of Students Today—and Tomorrow. National Association of State Boards of Education (2012). Key Recommendations include:

• Address digital citizenship and digital literacy
• Design instruction to take advantage of how each student learns now.
• Create policies that allocate resources based on data, student needs, and student, parent and stakeholder voices.
• Ensure that every student has adequate access to a computing device and the Internet at school and home.

Plugged into Learning: Computers Help Students Advance Learningfrom reserachers at Concordia University summarizes a 40 year retrospective of technology use in classrooms that shows gains in student achievement connected to technology use. (Tamin, R. M., Bernard, R. M., Borokhouski, E., Abrami, P. C., & Schmid, R. F. (2011, March). What forty years of research says about the impact of technology on learning: A second-order meta-analysis and validation study. Review of Educational Research, 81(1), 4-28.)

100 percent of colleges now use some form of social media to communicate with students. Barnes, N. G., & Lescault, A. M. (2011). Social media adoption soars as higher-ed experiments and reevaluates its use of new communications tools. Center for Marketing Research, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition from the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education.

College Students and Technology, a 2011 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, includes data on undergraduates and community college students.

Take a Giant Step: A Blueprint for Teaching Young Children in a Digital Age. Brigid Barron and Carol Copple. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, 2011.

Young Canadians in a Wired World: Phase III, Teachers' Perspectives. Valerie Steeves. Media Awareness Network, 2012.

Books on the History of Computers and Information Technology

Timeline of computer history from 1930-1994 from the Computer History Museum.

• Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. Seymour Papert. Perseus Publishing, 1993.
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers. Tom Standage, Walker and Company, 1998.
• When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Carolyn Marvin. Oxford University Press, 1988.
• River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2004.
• A Social History of Technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Oxford University Press, 1997.
• In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Shoshona Zuboff. Basic Books, 1989.
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, 2011.
• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton, 2013.
• The Young & The Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for our Future. S. Craig Watkins. Beacon Press, 2009.
• Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning. Marc Prensky. Corwin Press, 2010.
• Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. Jeremiah McCall. Routledge, 2011.
• Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Aaron Sams & Jonathan Bergmann, ISTE, 2012.
• What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. James Paul Gee. Second Edition. MacMillan, 2007.
• Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. Paul E. Peterson. Harvard University Press, 2012.
• The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. Susan Linn. The New Press, 2009.
• Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. Robert W. McChesney. The New Press, 2013.
• Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson. Penguin, 2014.
• Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology. Bill Ferster. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Web 3.0

Also known as the Semantic Web
Features information silos or groupings that allow for more specialized uses of online material
Characterized by such tools as RSS feeds, integration of the Web with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, targeted advertising, widgets, increased personal presence

"Internet will be transformed into a massive, universally searchable database and our place in it will be to organize this well-spring of information into slices that are palatable to us" Steve Spalding, July 14, 2007 from http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-define-web-30-2/